Thoughts on social media, business and journalism from Suw and Kevin Charman-Anderson

links for 2010-08-05

Kevin: A great post on Poynter E-Media Tidbits by Megan Taylor that builds on ideas about computational thinking by Greg Linch. Megan breaks down Greg's ideas into three simple concepts: Automation, algorithms and abstraction. She flags up a great example of how APIs at the New York Times allow them to cut down on repetitive work, according to Derek Willis.

Kevin: Edward Boches lists four lessons to learn from the New York Times, which now looks like it is starting to turn a corner in terms of their business. Just to highlight the first of his four points. "Get over the not invented here syndrome." Edward highlights their willingness to syndicate content from other niche sites like ReadWriteWeb and GigaOm. I'd also highlight not only their use but also investment in WordPress. Definitely worth checking out the four other points.

Kevin: My friend Andy Carvin with NPR highlights some results they found from canvasing opinion from some of the US public radio network's 1m fans on Facebook. More than 40,000 people responded. They have a compiled the results and shared them on their blog and also on Slideshare. Some highlights, almost all, 96% use Facebook at least once a day. The majority of the respondents listen between 1-3 hrs a day, while the average listener listens about 4.25 hrs a week. Almost three-quarters agreed that Facebook was a major way for them to receive news and information from NPR.

Kevin: Check-in service Gowalla has launched a service tied to political campaigns in the US. Campaigns can create events on Gowalla that supporters can check in at. As with many check-in services, they will get a badge related to the campaign. Supporters will also be able to register their own events. Gowalla also says that advocacy groups can use the service to "highlight their causes".

Kevin: This is a frank and brave post-mortem of a project created for the 2008 US elections. An associate professor had the idea to create a site that would bring together coverage from a few outlets in Missouri, where the project was based. However, she candidly lists her incorrect assumptions and also lessons she learned in promotion and community building.

Kevin: DocumentCloud program manager Amanda Hickman looks at recent uses of the document hosting tool including an annotated version of the controversial Arizona immigration law. The annotations highlight and explain what parts of the law were subject to a judges injunction.